The long-reigning standard for measuring throughput on a home internet connection is Kilobytes per second. We often talk about how we're getting "90K" downloads or capping our upload speed at "30K," but what do those terms mean? Does the K always have to be uppercase? And what the heck is a kibibit?
A blogger named Dumindu Pallewela offers a rundown of the basic terminology used to measure bandwidth bitrates on his Random Crap site. He also discusses the differences between kibibytes (binary measurement) and kilobytes (standard metric or decimal measurement). It's a good read, and recommended for forwarding to mom, uncle Steve or anyone who's wondering what all of those numbers at the bottom of their BitTorrent client mean.
[via Digg]
